Murder and the Married Virgin

Mike Shayne investigates an impossible murder in the Big Easy

It’s not often that Mike Shayne runs with an honorable crowd, but there is a lieutenant in his office mourning the fiancée who killed herself the day before. Honest and heartbroken, he begs this hardened private investigator for help answering one simple, impossible question: Why? It’s a question Shayne has been asking ever since his wife was murdered in Miami and he moved to New Orleans to escape her memory. For the sake of a soldier, he will put his own mourning aside and try to explain a suicide that looks an awful lot like murder.

Katrin Moe was working as a maid in the home of a wealthy New Orleans family when she was found locked in her room, the gas pumping full blast. Coincidentally, a priceless emerald necklace went missing from the house a few days before and the insurance company hired Shayne to find it. On the hunt for a killer, Shayne will find that the necklace and the crook are more closely related than meets the eye.